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I see it a bit differently than you do, rintintin.

From what I can tell (and I have read about ten of Sowell's books and watched a lot of interviews with him) Sowell is all about personal responsibility, but I am not convinced he would be against what Trump has put into effect.

As another poster said, Trump isn't for releasing violent felons (which the Left CLEARLY favors, with disastrous results that should be hung around their necks, sometimes with a rope as far as I am concerned in these cases) as this text from the First Step Act describes:

"...Offenses that make inmates ineligible to earn time credits are generally categorized as violent, or involve terrorism, espionage, human trafficking, sex and sexual exploitation; additionally excluded offenses are a repeat felon in possession of firearm, or high-level drug offenses. For more details, refer to the complete list of disqualifying offenses..."

This means that his criminal reform excludes people convicted of violent crime, which in the FBI/DOJ jargon means Homicide, Rape, Aggravated Assault, and Armed Robbery.

So those criminals aren't getting any reductions outright. For all I know there may be other pathways to release I am unaware of.

I do agree with you that I see Ivanka in some of it. I don't like it either, but in the end, Trump is, I think, his own person and makes his own choices on these things, sometimes against the advice of his team.

Some people don't like that, but I do. It eliminates some of the stink of politicians who have to have every phrase tested and every current of wind checked.

“When Trump brags about doing that, he is taking a page from the liberal narrative, not from Thomas Sowell”

One thing that I have noticed, and much more so since I have had kids and observed them going from pre-school through high school, is that there is not - CAN NOT - be only one way in which to teach people. In this context, perhaps Trump has done these things for 2 reasons: first, because many of these cases reflect some fundamental injustice, and the best that can be done is to release the particular individuals involved; and second, because perhaps this is looked upon (politically speaking) as the best way to reach a large portion of the black community. Not every black person is a Thomas Sowell or a Herman Cain - not intellectually, not morally, not by their experiences, just as in any ethnic group that you can name, not all people are the equals of those intellectual and moral leaders among them.

To put this is a different way, this is Trump the businessman deciding to do that which is most effective in achieving his goals, rather than following the (clearly) ineffective rules of the political world for the last several decades or longer.

I will also say this: as someone whose paternal grandfather ran from Russia at the end of the Communist Revolution, and who grew up listening to story after story about how evil the Communists were and are (among other things, they murdered my great grandfather, then in his 70s and suffering from cancer, for the “crime” of renting out part of his home in order to put on the table food that he couldn’t work for and which he couldn’t buy because all of the savings and investment of a lifetime of work were stolen from him by the Communists), I view ANYTHING that makes it less likely for the Dems (who are Collectivists little different from the Communists or, for that matter, the Nazis that murdered over 100 members of my mother’s extended family) to gain control over this nation as a good thing, even if it is imperfectly implemented. If mentioning what he did gains Trump and the Republican party even 0.5% of the black vote (or gets a similar number to stay home instead of voting Democrat), then I am for it, period. The entirety of our nation is literally on the line in this election; if Biden wins and they control Congress, then they will change things in such a way that there will literally never be another Republican President or Republican control of either House - we will become a one-party nation, California or New York (or Cuba or the USSR) on a national scale. It will literally be over, and I guarantee that we’ll be facing the likelihood of tens of millions of deaths among the liberty-minded (and, later, of random people for little or no reason at all), because that’s how Collectivists roll - and as far as I am concerned, even if Trump pardoned 10,000 murderers in order to prevent that (and he has, of course, done nothing of the sort), I would be for it if it worked. Bigger issues are at stake in this election than whether it is justified to release a few people from prison.